8Sided Blog

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Future Of Music Coalition On Political Campaigns and Music Licensing

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Here’s some more on this subject, as it seems to be quite the hot topic in my social media circles. The Future Of Music Coalition has released a factsheet on music licensing and political campaigns that explains a songwriter’s rights much clearer than I was able to in my previous post. One thing I was unsure about was whether a politician’s campaign could have a compulsory license that travels with them … the factsheet clarifies:

Anytime a campaign plays a song at a rally, they must ensure that they have a public performance license covering the composition’s use. Most major public venues such as convention centers and arenas typically purchase blanket licenses from performance rights organizations or PROS (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC) allowing campaigns to “publicly perform” any song in their repertoire, which includes the vast majority of compositions. However, these licenses may not cover all uses, so most national campaigns also purchase their own blanket licenses covering all campaign events; an additional benefit is that if they have a whistlestop event on the campaign trail at a factory or in a park and they throw a playlist on the P.A., they’d still be covered.


An ASCAP document specifically concerning music use in political events is linked, which is quite useful. That document also details other avenues that a songwriter could pursue to seek retribution, including a claim of ‘false endorsement.’ I’d like to know if that has been successfully used in a lawsuit against a political campaign under circumstances similar to the recent R.E.M. and Survivor cases. I bet it hasn’t. A judge would have a certain regard for the intelligence of the public … it would be seen as pretty obvious, from a legal standpoint, that playing an R.E.M. song as walk-on music doesn’t equate endorsement of a candidate.

8D Projects: O.O.R.S. – Les Deux Villes EP (Lucky Sun Recordings)

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We’ve taken on Lucky Sun Recordings, a relatively young label helmed by Londoner Tom Lown that promises a diverse set of forward-thinking electronic music. The releases do lean on the deeper, traditional house music side of things, and this single by the curiously named O.O.R.S. is a fine example. His two tracks here exhibit a keenness for the space between the sounds and a hypnotic use of rhythm and melody. The remix by Leeds-based producer Howard Sessions electrifies things just a bit, but remains as classy and refreshingly restrained as the rest of the single. Our 8DPromo campaign is currently in progress.

When A Song Is Used Without Permission At A Public Event

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The political season is revving up, so once again there’s a lot of talk about a song used without an artist’s permission at a political event. A lot of my friends have asked if a songwriter has any chance of retribution when this happens. With regards to a recent public rally, the talk being thrown around is that Survivor or their label should sue the organizers, or has sued (as many fake clickbait news stories are purporting). How can their song be used against their will at a large event in a public setting? And, it’s not like it was in a nightclub or coffeehouse that has an ASCAP / BMI / SESAC compulsory license, right?

Sorry to disappoint, but it is possible the use of the music was on the up-and-up. First of all, one can purchase a temporary compulsory license for music played at an outdoor event. It’s not difficult to do … I believe it can even be done through the PRO’s website. In Survivor’s case, this would be ASCAP, and the band would have allowed this by registering their music with the company. Anyway, this is basically a temporary version of the type of license that, say, a nightclub would purchase where the songs played in the establishment wouldn’t have to be ‘cleared’ in advance.

Furthermore, a songwriter cannot bar his or her music from being played at a public event, even if the writer feels the political message being presented is abhorrent. That’s the ‘compulsory’ part of the license. It would be the same if Survivor hated this one coffeehouse that had an ASCAP license and didn’t want their music played there … there’s nothing they can do as a member of the PRO. The exception is a synchronization license – that is, if the music is synced with video (a live TV broadcast of the public event doesn’t count). John McCain got into hot water for using a Foo Fighters song at an event in 2008, but this was due to the fact that he showed a video that had the music as its soundtrack. That’s a totally different type of license than the compulsory one that an organizer obtains for music just coming out of speakers, and the songwriters and publishers have a lot more control when the song is embedded with video.

I don’t know if the parties in question obtained the necessary license to play the music at the recent event, but I’m feeling they might have. It’s not exactly the ‘first rodeo’ for the politician who was involved. In that case, Survivor can only really do what they’ve been doing … publicly speaking out against the use of their song and the politics it has been unfortunately attached with.



Update: R.E.M. just got trolled, too.

Update 2: Here’s an article from The Atlantic on this mess … it’s got the outstanding title of Sigh Of The Tiger.

Update 3: Whoa. I guess Huckabee didn’t have his compulsory license in order after all.

Spotify Data Reveals Boom In Sleep And Relaxation Albums

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The Guardian:

Spotify’s fastest-growing music category is the newly named “environmental/sleep/relaxative” – in the last week alone, 282 albums from the category were added to the music streaming service’s catalogue, many times more than other genres including hard rock, latin pop and dancehall.



11.6% of all new albums on Spotify that week fell into its sleep and relaxation category, with collections including White Noise for Baby Sleep, Zen Spa, Beach Sleep Sounds and Spiritual Guitar Chillout.



Earlier in 2015, Spotify said that its users had created more than 2.8m sleep-themed playlists of their own, with Ed Sheeran’s Thinking Out Loud the most popular track among those collections.


Not surprising. I have recommended that clients aiming to boost their streaming income look into creating some ‘chill out’ tracks or albums. Streaming is especially suited for mellower moods, be it as a background for work, studying, relaxing … and, of course, sleeping. These are all activities where music is often used in the background, and playlists are repeated if found to be effective (sometimes in the same evening, in the case of a sleep soundtrack). Admittedly, it’s not necessarily exciting to create music to be used as a drowsy backdrop (unless you’re Eno, of course) but it might end up a pleasurable artistic detour that capitalizes on one of streaming’s inherent advantages.

Inspiration Or Appropriation?

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NPR:

Where do you draw the line between inspiration and appropriation when it comes to musical compositions? That question is at the heart of several high-profile court cases, including the recent “Blurred Lines” trial and a current copyright-infringement lawsuit involving “Stairway to Heaven.” But it isn’t always easy to prove a song is yours – particularly when you’re up against one of the biggest rock and roll bands of all time.



But proving a song is yours isn’t always easy, says leading music attorney Ken Anderson. “The first step is establishing ownership,” Anderson says. “That means that the material is original to you, meaning you’re the one who created the material.” [He] says you also have to show that the accused had access to your material.



“We listen to the music if it’s recorded, or we study it if it’s only in written form,” says [musicologist Judith Finell, who has testified in many high-profile cases]. “And usually, we transcribe any section of that music if it sounds similar to the other music we’re comparing it to. Then we start to determine if they have similar pitches in common, similar rhythms. What is it that makes them sound related?”


This is a fun radio piece from NPR, which does focus mostly on Led Zeppelin’s infamous ‘appropriations.’ I wouldn’t put the “Blurred Lines” case in the same category as “Stairway To Heaven”, though … I see some merit in the latter, but, personally, not much in the former. (As I tweeted to a friend the week that the “Blurred Lines” lawsuit went for the plaintiff, “I wonder what the Bob Marley estate is thinking right now.”)

I’ve recently been doing some consulting work for a well-known songwriter, and a recent top 40 hit by an unrelated artist contains a melody line that is suspiciously similar to one of hers. The artist in question (or, more likely, his label) was proactive in that he gave my client shared songwriting credit, but without contacting her. We found out through online press that the song received. No one here is upset – the similar part is brief, and my client is happy for the extra royalty that should come in – but this practice of preventively crediting songwriters that may or may not have been intentionally appropriated is new to me. It’s probably a lot more common than I know, mainly due to the issues raised in the NPR piece.

Hitting The Links

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So many links, so little time. For your perusal, here’s a round-up of some unrelated articles that I’ve found interesting in the past week:

Alchemy Of Sound: On The Occult And Soviet Synthesizers

The father of futurist music, a Russian occultist and experimental composer by the name of Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, inspired the creation of an optoelectronic machine capable of converting into sound any symbols sketched onto a large pane of glass: the Soviet ANS synthesizer.


Dubbing Is A Must: A Beginner’s Guide To Jamaica’s Most Influential Genre

For many, dub appears an impenetrable genre – the sort of thing we know we should be into, but we don’t quite know where to start with. That’s why we asked David Katz – renowned reggae historian, photographer and more – to write us the Beginner’s Guide to Dub, with quotes from Bunny Lee, Niney the Observer, Glen Brown, Adrian Sherwood, Dennis Alcapone, Roy Cousins and more. We’ve also compiled an accompanying playlist on the last page of this article.


Apple Admits It Has ‘Homework To Do’ To Improve Apple Music

“There’s a lot of work going into making the product better. Our focus is on editorial and playlists, and obviously we have teams all around the world working on that, but we’re also adding features and cleaning up certain things,” Oliver Schusser, vice president, iTunes International, told the Guardian.



Asked about criticisms of Apple Music’s usability – which has seen users complaining of corrupted libraries and unintuitive interfaces – Schusser said: “The product is always our priority, and we are getting a lot of feedback. Remember, this was a very big launch in 110 markets instantly, so we get a ton of feedback. We’re obviously trying to make it better every day.” he said.


Lawrence Lessig: The Question For My Critics

Yes, we cannot know the details. But we cannot let the details stop us from the most important reform our democracy needs. The question isn’t simply, what might go wrong. The question is also, what do we know will go wrong if we do nothing? And is that risk greater than the risk of trying something different?

Mixcloud’s Place In Digital Music’s Brave New World

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Cuepoint interviewed Mixcloud co-founder Nico Perez:

The thing that would set a podcast apart [from Mixcloud] is that you would actually download it to your phone. To do that legally is incredibly difficult, as you have to obtain clearances for all of the songs and clearances to download. That is something that we’ve steered away from, conducting the streaming model. Because of that, we got the licenses needed for streaming and we pay royalties to the artists listened to in the stream.



We’re slightly different in that we are a radio service and you can’t come to Mixcloud and select a song that you want to listen to and hit play, unlike the Spotifys and Soundclouds of the world. That said, a subscription service that would make sense could be of interest to us, it’s just question of working out the economics and make sure that they work for everybody. Something not too expensive, not the ten dollars you would pay per month for Spotify, because at the end of the day you’re not going to have access to 30 million songs on demand. It’s a different sort of service.


Mixcloud is party to its own legal maneuvering in providing DJ mix content, as observant US-based users may have noticed. In this country, track lists are not available until the mix has been played in full (though skipping ahead sometimes makes them visible), and mixes containing the same artist more than four times are blocked. There’s also the inability to scrub backward in a mix, and of course the ‘no download’ thing (though, of course, that applies globally). These are all restrictions in place due to royalty and licensing laws here – as regulated by SoundExchange – in an attempt to keep Mixcloud free of major label meddling and out of SoundCloud’s present hot water. I feel the Mixcloud-as-radio-station strategy is a good one, and reportedly the service aims to strengthen the radio association by adding live ‘broadcasts’. Some may balk at these restrictions, but users need to realize that total freedom of content access comes at a cost to the services (especially with regards to DJ mixes) and isn’t sustainable. Mixcloud has its flaws, but they are thinking ahead and implementing these restrictions in ways that aren’t sudden and antagonistic to its users. They’ve also worked out a way to pay out some royalty to rightsholders, keeping them at bay (for now). SoundCloud should take note.

Music Hasn’t Killed The Compact Cassette

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Here’s a comprehensive article from a couple years back on the history of the ‘compact cassette’, featuring this nugget that might ring familiar:

With [all-in-one stereo systems] gaining popularity through the mid-1970s and beyond, the issue of copying became a bone of contention. People were sharing their vinyl records and taping them. Records could be borrowed from public libraries and cassette copies made. It was stealing. In other territories, developing countries in particular, where the Compact Cassette was more widespread than other forms of recorded media, the sale of pirate copies was commonplace.



While these overseas activities were beyond the reach of Western record companies, back home in Blighty, the BPI led a campaign to bring our music-ripping nation to book in the 1980s. The slogan “Home Taping Is Killing Music” was the industry’s browbeating missive to counter its fears that record sales would suffer due as a consequence.



Yet for the consumer, taping and sharing music was a way of discovering new bands and for many artists, this was acceptable because it was a way of growing their fan base. Fans that would soon enough buy their records and probably attend concerts with their mates.



The pros and cons of copying is an argument that still rages to this day. Certainly, Philips had no idea that the introduction of a dictation machine some two decades earlier would lead to such strife.


Meanwhile, this piece in Deutsche Welle – How Magnetic Tape Changed Music Consumption – also runs down the cassette’s history with a photo gallery and a short video documentary.

And then Bloomberg Business presents a recent video visit to National Audio Company, a ‘blank media supplier’ that claims to be be “making more audio cassettes than we’ve ever made.” A shocking claim, but I know my friends at the Cold Busted label have been releasing limited edition cassettes to some surprising success.

I do have fond memories of recording songs and projects on my Tascam four-track cassette ‘portastudio’. I’ve even said that this may have been my most creative time, given how the limitations of the medium forced ‘outside-of-the-box’ thinking. But it’s a format I certainly don’t miss (besides its kinda endearing hiss), and I admit being a bit bewildered at its tiny resurgence, beyond writing it all off as some sort of ironic statement. Any current fans of the compact cassette care to enlighten us on how it maintains appeal?

Some Days We Rave Like We Used To

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Reminiscing about olden times, The Guardian presents “the story of the UK’s biggest rave anthems.” Here’s A Guy Called Gerald on “Voodoo Ray”:

When Voodoo Ray was in the charts, I was still working at McDonald’s. There were all these excuses [about why the money didn’t come through]. I thought, something’s gone wrong here: I’ve got two tracks in the charts – Voodoo Ray and [808 State’s] Pacific State [which Simpson co-wrote] – but I’m still having to walk to the centre of Manchester from Longsight with a bag of equipment because I can’t afford to get a bus.


… and Garry Cobain of The Future Sound of London on “Papua New Guinea”:

Name me another period of music when way-out instrumental music could be hits. People were talking about the deepest bassline like it was a hooky vocal. The further out we went, the more people would trip out and the more people would buy it, and that’s a complete inversion of how pop usually works. We didn’t feel like we could work with exotic musicians but we wanted to bring that level of depth into sampling, which was the ability of two skint boys in their early 20s to seem exotic and worldly without asking anybody’s permission.


But then, unrelated – or is it? – comes this bit of unintentional nostalgia from Los Angeles via Billboard Biz:

Following the death of two teenagers attending the HARD Summer electronic music festival — held at the Los Angeles County-owned Fairplex — the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors yesterday (Sep. 1) unanimously approved the formation of an “Electronic Music Task Force” that would provide recommendations on ways to make electronic music fests safer for attendees. The motion also states a ban on electronic music festivals “remains a possibility.”


Everything old is new again?

8D Projects: Ursula 1000 – Faded Denim Wash (Insect Queen Music)

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We’re now working with Ursula 1000, helping with his self-founded label Insect Queen Music. “Faded Denim Wash” is the first single off Ursula’s upcoming album Voyeur, and it’s fantastic … groovy disco and funk elements abound, with a touch of balearic spaciousness to make for a sophisticated sound. A diverse set of remixes come from a talented set of relative newcomers, including Abelard, Golf Channel’s Payfone, Robot 84, and (our personal favorite) Seahawks. We’ve launched an 8DPromo campaign today.